Talk:Vicious circle/Archives/2012

History of theory?

I'm helping someone with a thesis, and they want to use "Virtuous Circle" as the theoretical backbone. I'm having trouble finding the person who first developed the theory . . . Can it be attributed to one source? It sounds like it, especially with the "Twentieth Century" part. Can anyone help? Thanks!

To answer your question, I did some internet search and it appears that the phrase: vicious and virtuous economic cycles were not that popular until recently. The closest to a definition or an explanation that I could find is by International Institute of Management in an article written by Med Jones, titled US Economy Risks and Strategies for 2007-2007 – The article is dated June, 2006

http://www.iim-edu.org/u.s.economyrisks/

I’m including the definition/explanation below.

2) U.S. Economic Risks

This section provides a quick assessment of the U.S. economic health status. The basic commonsense formula to assess the health of an economy is as follows:

Over the long term, if government revenues are more than expenditures (surplus), then the economic health of the country is good, because the government can afford to invest in development projects such as research and development, education and infrastructure. With more income, the government can also afford to lower taxes, which increase corporate profits and attracts more foreign investors, resulting in more economic activities, creating more jobs and enlarging the consumer spending and government revenues overall despite income tax cuts. It is what I call a virtuous economic cycle.

Over the long term, if government revenues continue to be less than the expenditures (deficit). This will result in accumulated debt. An increasing government debt will result in higher interest payments, and less money available for socioeconomic development. To pay for the debt, the government will have to raise taxes, which will reduce the competitive position of the country in the global economy and chase investors away resulting in less economic activities and more job losses. In order to avoid higher unemployment and social instability, the government have to raise more debt to fund spending and welfare support by raising the interest rate which will increase the cost of money, reduce corporate profits and slow economic investments, thus resulting in more job losses. It is what I call a vicious economic cycle.

What is interesting is the article predicted the economic crisis and used the terms vicious economic cycles and virtual economic cycles to explain the current sharp decline cycle.

Although this might not be the oldest use of the terms, but I hope it helps as a source. The other interesting thing about the article is that I Googled the phrase, US Economy Risks, and found it to be the first search result out of about 100 million pages, so it must have had a lot of exposure and influenced the current popularity of the terms. It was also widely quoted by the media like Scoop New Zealand, Bloomberg, Reuters and so on. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.170.10.158 (talk) 02:02, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

CMF —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Engender (talk • contribs) 7 March, 2006.

The comment about austin powers's movie seems a bit misplaced here. I think it should be deleted. Zé - 21/08/2006

Indeed. Fat Bastard's particular example of the vicious cycle seems unnecessary.

Euthyphro Dilemma

Euthyphro dilemma is cited as another example of cycle, but it is not a cycle at all, rather a dilemma about the implications of two hypotheses in theistic moral. The only "cycle" it could imply would be a mutual logical lack, which cannot be properly called a vicious nor virtuous cycle because it does not concern cyclic reinforcement. I suggest that the reference to this dillemma be removed. 24.202.61.223 (talk) 03:40, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

References?

This is a good article, but needs citations, and a reference section - not a notes section.--Benjamin 08:00, 18 March 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Benjamin9832 (talk • contribs)